White Paper : Best Practices for Small/Medium Web Sites
Now that you've got a web site you're probably wondering about care and feeding instructions.
Just like that puppy you wanted when you were young, if you want a web site you've got to be
willing to take responsibility for it.
Listed below are my suggested best practices for web site owners. Not all of them may
apply to you, but you'd better have a pretty good reason if you aren't going to do it. I've
divided these up into infrastructure and marketing tasks. Infrastructure tasks help ensure
what you have is working properly and will continue working. Marketing tasks help make
your web site valuable to you and your customers.
Marketing Tasks
Explain what you do
Don't assume your visitors already know all about you, and don't make them guess, they
don't have time. Tell them exactly what you do and what they'll find on your site as simply
and helpfully as you can. It's much better to inform your visitors on your first page than it
is to impress them. So forget about the exploding Shockwave animations, instead provide a
simple paragraph that explains to someone who's never heard of you why they should stay
and explore your site. If you're trying to sell something tell them what, if you're trying
to inform explain your topic.
Prominent Contact information
Don't make your site visitors hunt for a way to get in touch with you. Put a link to
your contact information on every page and make sure the information itself is complete
and up to date. Give full mailing address, e-mail (hyperlinked), web form for inquiries,
phone number, and fax number.
e-mail auto-response
If customers e-mail you or submit a form to your site make sure they get a response
right away, don't leave them hanging wondering if you've even received their mail. An
automatic response immediately reassures them that you have received it, and that you'll
get back to them. Then follow up as quickly as you can with a personal response. Speed
counts, if you don't know exactly how to respond then request more information from the
customer, engage them in a dialogue.
Forms
Use web forms
to get feedback from your site visitors. Forms encourage your customers
to communicate with you, and they allow you to gather more and better targeted information
about your customers interests and questions. Sites should have some combination of these
forms:
- A mailing list form to let people sign up for your mailing list. (You do have a
mailing list don't you?)
- Support form to offer help to your customers on your products or services.
- Sales or other general inquiries to let people ask questions easily.
- A feedback form to let people easily comment on your site.
- FAQ form to let people ask questions that aren't covered by your FAQ.
Search keyword tracking
Find out how visitors are getting to your site. What interests them about your site
enough to make them come see you? One of the best ways to find that out is through the
information in your
web log files. These logs can include the query a user typed into
a search engine to get to your site. This also helps you find out how you are doing in
placement in the search engines for various searches. Once you know, you can highlight
those aspects of your site that visitors are interested in. You can target your sales
effort to that interest.
Meta tag values
Make sure that you have contact information and keywords properly encoded on each
page using the right meta tags. This will help your placement in the search engines
and make you and your pages easier to find. For example:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Books</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Children's book reviews for grades
K-12 by elementary and secondary school teachers. Also links to buy the books online.
">
<META name="keywords" content="books, childrens books, reviews,
teachers, education">
<meta name="E-Mail" content="books@mybooks.com">
</HEAD>
[The above meta tags and web site are purely fictional - any
relation to a real internet site is coincidental and unintentional.]
Infrastructure Tasks
Site monitoring
Make sure your site is available, that people can get to it and read your content. For
static sites this is pretty easy, many ISPs already offer an option to alert you if
there's anything wrong with your site. There are also some excellent and inexpensive
web services that can check your site every few minutes to make sure it's still there
and working properly. There's no point in doing any of the rest of these tasks
if your site isn't visible, so make this a priority.
Link testing
Don't give your visitors a page missing error, not when you've worked so hard to get them
there in the first place. You need to maintain your site defensively to prevent this, and
then you also need to
test it to ensure it's all still working. Defensive maintenance is
neccessary because your site isn't the only source of page missing errors.
Site testing will check if one of the pages on your site points to a non-existant link.
That's good, but it's not enough. Imagine that you have a promotion running and the page
is at http://domain.com/promo/special.html. When the promo is over you remove the page,
your link testing shows that you still have a link to it from your main sales page, no
problem, you remove the link. Problem solved right? Wrong, your site no longer has any
broken links on it, but that doesn't mean that external sites that point to you don't
still point to the now missing page. So when a visitor tries to follow that link they're
going to think your site is broken, and they'll likely leave.
There are two ways to improve this problem, first, try to keep your pages stable. Don't
reorganize your site frequently, and don't change your page names a lot. Yes it takes
work and forethought to avoid doing that, but if it gives your visitors a better experience
then it's worth it. Second, make sure you provide a custom error page when a page is
missing. This custom page should have the look and feel of your site, giving your
visitor confidence that there's something there to see, and should provide some good
links to starting points in your site for various kinds of information.
Security
Viruses, trojan horses, denial of service attacks, all look like they'll be part of
Internet life for a while. You want to keep your site available and healthy, and with
a server on the Internet you need take responsibility for keeping it safe. Depending
on the value of your online assets (Do you accept and store credit card info? Private
information about your site visitors?) security can be more or less complicated. At the
very least you should follow two standard security best practices.
- Keep up to date with security patches from your OS and software vendors.
- Use the top 20 security vulnerabilities list at SANS/FBI Top Twenty
to protect your server. This list
is very detailed and includes great instructions on how to fix common problems.
Related Sites & Articles
Meta Tag Lawsuits - Is it illegal to use trademarked terms in your meta tags?
Not necessarily. Can you get sued? Yes, and people have.
How To Use HTML Meta Tags - Meta tags provide a useful way to
control your summary in some search engines. The search engines that support meta
tags can be found on the Search Engine Features page.
META Tag Builder - Use the form to generate your
"robot friendly" Title and META Tags.
WebDeveloper.com - tools and techniques for web site construction.
Security
Intelligence Services for Business - including "Basic Security Checklist for
Home and Office Users"
The CERTŪ Coordination Center - studies Internet security vulnerabilities, handles
computer security incidents, publishes security alerts, researches long-term changes in
networked systems, and develops information and training to help you improve security
at your site.
|
